Find Your Angle
Building Burnout Resilience in Software
Before we talk about finding your angle in the work you do, I want to call out a few caveats.
This isn’t a replacement for real support when the problem is bigger than work. If you’re dealing with depression, anxiety, grief, or anything that makes day-to-day life feel heavy, you deserve more than a mindset shift.
And some companies are genuinely unhealthy. If your team is chronically understaffed, boundaries are punished, or everything runs on fear, you’re not going to “angle” your way out of that.
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Most software engineers don’t burn out because they can’t do the work.
They burn out because the work starts to feel disconnected.
You ship. You close tickets. You move to the next thing. Over time, it can start to feel like nothing you do really lands.
That’s where burnout gets traction. The World Health Organization describes burnout as chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been effectively managed, and it includes feelings of mental distance and cynicism.
Finding your angle is how you push back.Your angle is the reason you can honestly point to and say, “This is why I’m willing to do this today.” It’s the part of the work you can connect to, even when the task itself is tedious or boring.
The Core of Building Your Angle
If you wait for the work itself to stay interesting, you’re going to have a rough career.
Software has plenty of days that are valuable and still not fun. Bug fixes. Migrations. “Glue work.” Meetings. Tickets that exist because systems are complicated and the world is messy.
Angles are different. They are stable. They give you something tangible to build around.
I see three angles that consistently hold up in software and most knowledge work:
- Competence: getting better on purpose
- Autonomy: shaping the work instead of absorbing it
- Connection: tying your effort to a person or an outcome
These map cleanly to a well-researched idea from motivation psychology:
people do better when they experience competence, autonomy, and connection to others.
Angle 1: Competence (getting better on purpose)
Competence is the simplest angle to build because it’s mostly under your control.You can’t always pick the work. You can almost always choose something you’ll get better at while doing it.
A lot of burnout comes with a quiet thought in the background: “I’m doing a lot, but I’m not growing.” When that shows up, even good weeks start to feel flat.
Here are a few ways to build competence without adding a bunch of extra work:
Pick one micro-skill for the next sprint.
Not “get better at architecture.” Something smaller: tracing production issues, writing better tests, improving your ability to cut scope without cutting value, and learning the domain rules behind the tickets you keep seeing.
If you want a practical path for improving your skills, check out How to Become a Domain Expert.
Tighten the feedback loop.
Competence grows when you can tell quickly if you’re right. Smaller slices, earlier validation, quicker review cycles. To Get Better Feedback, Show Your Work provides you with clear steps on how to build this skill.
Raise the bar.
One missing test. One refactor in a hotspot. One small automation that removes a repetitive step. These are the kinds of wins that rarely get celebrated, but they create real pride in the craft.
Check out How to Win in The Margins for more information on how to raise everyone around you.
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Where can AI save you time?
My friends at Big Creek Growth put together a quick survey to spot the repetitive work you can hand off to automation.
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Angle 2: Autonomy (shaping the work without needing a title)
Autonomy changes how work feels.
Not because you suddenly control priorities, but because you stop feeling like work is only happening to you. Even small amounts of real control change your posture. You move from “tell me what to do” to “here’s how we should do this.”
The mistake people make is thinking autonomy only comes with seniority. In practice, it shows up whenever you shape the work to improve the outcome.
Here is how you can develop autonomy in your work:
Ask for the “what,” then propose the “how.”
Don’t treat the first approach you think of as the only option. Offer two paths and name the tradeoff. This builds trust and increases ownership.
Use “yes, if” when the ask is too big.
This is one of the cleanest ways to stop accidental overcommitment. Work on saying “Yes, if we drop X. Yes, if we split this into two deliveries. Yes, if we can get a decision on edge cases first.”
Protect your focus.
Autonomy is also about defending attention. One two-hour block per week can be enough to keep you from living in shallow work. Make sure you don’t become part of The Time Management Problem in Software.
Own a slice end-to-end.
Not a giant system. A small slice where you can carry it through release and validation. Ownership changes how work feels.
Angle 3: Connection (tying your effort to a person or outcome)
Connection is the angle that disappears first when work gets heavy.
You spend your day in tickets, PRs, and Slack threads. You ship a change. You move on. If you never see who it helped or what it changed, the work starts to feel abstract. That’s where cynicism creeps in.
Connection is how you rebuild the line of sight.
Here is how you can build more connections in your work:
Close the loop
Pick one thing you shipped this week and follow up with a real person. Did it fix it? Is it better now? What still hurts? This gives you feedback, trust, and a clearer sense of impact.
Talk to the next person in the chain.
If you can’t talk to customers, talk to the people closest to the pain: support, QA, product, customer success, sales engineering. Ask where it breaks down in real life.
Be the friction reducer.
Are You Creating Lift or Drag? A lot of impact never shows up on a roadmap. It shows up when you write PRs with real context, review quickly so people aren’t blocked, hand off cleanly so work doesn’t bounce back, and leave behind docs that save the next person time.
Translate the impact.
When you finish something, write one sentence that describes the change: reduced rework, safer deploys, less manual support effort, lower risk, more clarity.
When the work starts to feel empty, it’s usually because the connection got lost.
The backlog will always be there. The pressure will come and go. Some weeks will be heavy, no matter how good you are.
Finding your angle is a practical way to make the work sustainable anyway.
Competence keeps the craft alive. Autonomy keeps you from feeling trapped in other people’s priorities. Connection keeps your effort tied to something real.
Pick one angle and apply it to the work you already have in front of you. Not perfectly. Not forever. Just on purpose.
That’s how you build burnout resilience in a field that never really slows down.